Send me email updates about messages I've received on the site and the latest news from The CafeMom Team.
By signing up, you certify that you are female and accept the Terms of Service and have read the
Privacy Policy.

If you criminalise owning guns, then the only guns will be those owned by criminals.

I've just come across that same syllogism in a different context:

If you pass laws allowing the state to breach the privacy of citizens, then only criminals will have privacy.

The context was a piece of software called "TOR", that is designed to let people use the internet in a way that can't be traced back to them. This is useful for whistleblowers, and democracy activists living in repressive countries. However, any software powerful enough to prevent the NSA tracing a whistleblower using it is, necessarily, also powerful enough to prevent the NSA tracing a pædophile using it.

Criminals can already do bad things. Since they're willing to
break laws, they already have lots of options available that provide
better privacy than Tor provides. They can steal cell
phones,
use them, and throw them in a ditch; they can crack into computers
in Korea or Brazil and use them to launch abusive activities; they
can use spyware, viruses, and other techniques to take control of
literally millions of Windows machines around the world.

Tor aims to provide protection for ordinary people who want to
follow
the law. Only criminals have privacy right now, and we need to fix
that.

Some advocates of anonymity explain that it's just a tradeoff —
accepting the bad uses for the good ones — but there's more to it
than that.
Criminals and other bad people have the motivation to learn how to
get good anonymity, and many have the motivation to pay well to
achieve
it. Being able to steal and reuse the identities of innocent victims
(identity theft) makes it even easier. Normal people, on the other
hand,
don't have the time or money to spend figuring out how to get
privacy online. This is the worst of all possible worlds.

So yes, criminals could in theory use Tor, but they already have
better options, and it seems unlikely that taking Tor away from the
world will stop them from doing their bad things. At the same time,
Tor
and other privacy measures can fight identity theft,
physical
crimes like stalking, and so on.

I think that, criminals will do whatever they need/want to achieve their goal. Guns, internet privacy..whatever. They have people designing programs FOR their specific needs..there are crates of military grade guns coming into this country illegally every day.

Send me email updates about messages I've received on the site and the latest news from The CafeMom Team.
By signing up, you certify that you are female and accept the Terms of Service and have read the
Privacy Policy.